Museums - British Museum

Established by an Act of Parliament in 1753 and opened in 1759, the British Museum was founded upon the private collection of physician, naturalist, and collector Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), who willed more than 71,000 objects, along with his library and herbarium, to the British Crown. The original collections largely consisted of books, manuscripts, and natural history, with some antiquities and ethnographical materials. Sir William Hamilton's collection of Greek vases and other classical objects was purchased in 1772, followed by the Rosetta Stone and other Egyptian antiquities in 1802. The Townley Collection of classical sculpture was acquired in 1805, and the sculptures of the Parthenon, known as the Elgin Marbles, in 1816. The British Museum was greatly involved in excavation abroad, and the appointment in 1851 of Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks (1826–97) led to the growth of such fields as British and European prehistory, ethnography, Oriental art, and archaeology.
The museum was a new type of institution from the outset, governed by a body of trustees responsible to Parliament, preserving a collection owned by the nation, and open free of charge to the public. First housed in a seventeenth-century mansion, Montagu House, which stood on the site of today's building, it has undergone a variety of divisions and expansions since its inception. In 1823, the gift to the nation by George IV of his father's library (the King's Library) led to the construction of the current quadrangular building, which was designed by Sir Robert Smirke and completed in 1857. In the 1880s, the natural history collections were moved to a new building in South Kensington, which became the Natural History Museum. This departure and the construction of the White Wing made room for the increasing collections. King Edward VII's Galleries, which opened in 1914, the Duveen Gallery (1939/62), and the New Wing (1978) provided additional facilities and space. The museum's library became part of the new British Library in 1973, and the books left for a new building at St. Pancras in 1997. The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, which was created in part of the space vacated by the library, opened in 2000. Around and beneath it new galleries were built, including the Sainsbury Africa Galleries, the Wellcome Gallery, and the Clore Education Centre. The restored King's Library opened in 2003.
In the late 1960s, storage and exhibition of the museum's ethnographic collections was temporarily moved to the Museum of Mankind in London's Burlington Gardens. There they were maintained for 27 years, until the auxiliary museum's closure. The collections that were diverted to the Museum of Mankind have been gradually reintegrated into the British Museum since that time, and the completion of the new Andean and Pacific Galleries, scheduled for 2008–2010, will make the transition final.
Today, the museum holds vast and important collections of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; antiquities from ancient Egypt and Sudan; Asian art; international coins and medals; Classical treasures from Greece and Rome; Middle Eastern art; European art and antiquities from prehistory to the modern period; prints and drawings; and remarkable works in precious metals and stones. The collection of the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas includes around 350,000 objects, most of which were acquired during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and largely date from this time. Most of the ethnographic material in Sir Hans Sloane’s founding collection was included in a catalogue of Miscellanies, numbering 2,100 items, of which 100 are still found in the Department. Ethnography and antiquities were displayed at the museum in classic Cabinet of Curiosities style until the return of the Third Voyage of Captain James Cook to London in 1780, when a South Seas Room was established to display works from the Pacific. Reorganizations occurred in the beginning and middle of the nineteenth century according to the changing scientific viewpoints of the time. In the twentieth century, Asian antiquities were removed from the department to a separate Department of Oriental Antiquities. The Department of Ethnography, (1946–2004) supported the collections from most of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, as well as those from generally small-scale societies in Asia and Europe. In 2004, the structure and title of the department was changed to the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
The British Museum's Department of Asia, which covers a vast geographical area from Afghanistan to Japan and Southeast Asia, contains extremely important treasures of Near and Far Eastern art alongside collections of ancient artifacts and tribal art. One of the most important elements in the museum's Asian tribal holdings is its collection of Southeast Asian textiles, which ranks as one of the earliest and largest in the world.